“Did the first Templars really find it after digging around those ruins?” she asked. “Or was that just their cover story? What if it had been part of the trove of Nicaea from day one?”
“So they lied to the pope to sex it up? To make it sound more mysterious, more mythical?”
“Partly,” Tess speculated. “It would also keep the rest of the trove safe. There was no reason for them to alert the pope and his cronies to the fact that there were all these other gospels and writings out there. Why put it all at risk?”
“But that would mean the founding Templars knew about the trove from day one,” Reilly observed.
“Which begs the question,” Tess jumped in, “who were they really, and why did they choose to make their move and blackmail the pope when they did?” She was having trouble keeping up with the implications of every new realization. Everything she’d thought she knew about the origins of the Templars—who they really were, where they came from, why they appeared when they did, what they were really trying to achieve—it was all suddenly thrown into question.
“When did they first show up on the map?”
“In 1118. A pretty revolutionary time,” she thought aloud, her mind on fire now. “It was the first time that any pope, the leader of the Catholic Church and Jesus’s representative on earth, wasn’t spreading His message of love and peace. Instead, he was telling his flock to go out and kill in the name of Christ, telling them all their sins would be forgiven and Heaven would be theirs if they went out and butchered the heathen in the name of the Cross. And at that point, his holy army was winning. They had taken over Jerusalem, the Muslims were on the ropes. The pope was the leader of the only superpower around, and the world was his for the taking.”
Reilly processed her words. “Maybe someone, somewhere decided to create a counterpoint?” he put in. “A force that could check Rome’s supremacy and maybe put the brakes on before it all got out of hand?”
Tess nodded, her eyes distant. “Maybe everything we thought we knew about the Templars is wrong.”
A silence fell over them, allowing their ideas to find some purchase. Then Tess’s expression lost its inspired lightness and sank, heavy with trepidation. “I can see why our Iranian friend wanted to get his hands on Hosius’s stash. We’ve got to find it, Sean. If it’s out there, we’ve got to find it first. We can’t let some bastards in Tehran dump it on an unprepared world.”
“You really think it can still cause trouble?” he questioned. “Even in today’s world? People out there are pretty cynical.”
“Not about this. Not about the Bible. There are two billion Christians out there, Sean, and a lot of them think of the Bible as God’s words. His actual words. They think the twenty-seven texts that make up the New Testament were handed down to us by God himself, to help us lead better lives and achieve eternal salvation. They don’t realize that nothing could be farther from the truth and that what we call the Bible was actually put together a few hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion. But we know different. We know for a fact that early Christianity was very diverse in its beliefs and in its writings. It was made up of scattered communities of people who had competing interpretations of what Jesus was and what he preached and what he did, communities that based their faiths on very different ideas. And before too long, they started squabbling about whose version was right. Ultimately, one of these groups won by gaining more converts than the others. And the winners decided which of these early writings were the ones their converts should follow, they changed them to fit the story they settled on, and they branded all the others blasphemous and heretical and suppressed them. They buried the competition, along with their beliefs and practices, and then they rewrote the history of the whole struggle. My point is, they decided what would be considered genuine, sacred scripture, and what wouldn’t. And they did a great job. There’s hardly anything left of the texts they didn’t like. The only reason we know they even existed is that they’re occasionally mentioned by early church writers, and the handful of copies we have of any of these competing versions are down to the occasional fluke, like the discovery of that stash of gnostic gospels at Nag Hammadi back in the 1940s.”
“Until now,” Reilly put in.
“Absolutely. And imagine for a second what would have happened if one of the other groups of Christians had won that struggle. We could have ended up with a very different religion, one that doesn’t have much in common with what we call Christianity today. And that’s if it would have made it this far in the first place. ‘Cause it’s possible, even likely, that if Christianity hadn’t taken on the form it did take, the all-welcoming, supernatural story of death and resurrection and eternal salvation that cobbled together elements from all the empire’s existing religions into a new, one-size-fits-all package—Mithraism, Sol Invictus, a virgin birth, a resurrection three days later, the day of the sun and ‘Sunday,’ the twenty-fifth of December—and allowed it to grow in an organized way and become the official religion of the Roman Empire … Constantine might not have embraced it. He might not have been able to convince his pagan populace to accept it, and our world would be very different today. Without Christianity as its bedrock, Western civilization would’ve developed in ways you and I can’t even begin to imagine. And it’s all down to the sacred texts the founders chose to build their church on. Cause that’s what any religion boils down to, isn’t it? Scripture. Sacred texts. A story, a fable, a mythical tale that someone wrote down a hell of long time ago.
“But those early, competing Christianities were very, very different. And their gospels, their scripture, described a very different set of events and a very different set of beliefs from those in the New Testament. Some described Jesus as a Buddha-like preacher whose secrets would only be revealed to a few lucky initiates. Others talk about him as a revolutionary leader who would liberate the poor from their Roman oppressors by force. Some of them describe Jesus as a divinely inspired guide to spiritual enlightenment who went around saying very New Agey things like ‘You saw the Spirit, you became Spirit. You saw the Christ, you became Christ. You saw the Father, you shall become Father.’ They have radically different takes on the whole human-divine debate about Jesus and on how we can achieve salvation—though it usually boils down to understanding the true meaning of Jesus’s words and discovering the truth about our own divine selves without the need for priests or churches or weird cannibalistic rituals like eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. And fans of these non-canonical gospels will tell you they predate the four that are in the Bible. They’ll claim—and there’s a lot of evidence to support this—that the four gospels in the canon were heavily edited and massaged to support the setting up of an organized church in His name and to justify having a hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons and give them power over their followers as the legitimate heirs of the apostles and—and this is the key part—the exclusive providers of eternal salvation. Which is what they achieved. Exclusivity. Remember, before Christianity, people in the Roman Empire worshipped all kinds of gods. No one had a problem with that. There was huge tolerance and respect, and the concept of heresy and of believing in ‘the right god’—orthodoxy—didn’t exist. There was no sin we needed to be saved from, either. It was only with Christianity that the idea of what a person believed in started to matter, and matter a lot, because his or her eternal life suddenly depended on it.
“Purists and staunch Bible defenders, on the other hand, will tell you anything that doesn’t conform to the four gospels in the canon is of dubious origin. They’ll say they had to be written after the four gospels that are in the Bible, and they’ll tell you their authors were ‘corrupted’ by gnostic influences. They label them ‘heretic.’ You know what the word means? Choice. Literally. That’s the root of the word. It just means someone who chooses to believe something else. That’s all. But the winners chose what we should believe in. They chose which writings were sacred and which ones were ‘heretical.’
&n
bsp; “The thing is, right now, we don’t know for a fact which one of the two sides is right. We don’t know which writings are the ‘corrupted’ ones. It’s all theory and conjecture—because there’s so little that survives from back then. We don’t know for a fact when Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written, or in what order. We don’t. We don’t really know who wrote them, but we know it wasn’t any of them—they’re not written in the first person, for starters, and we know they were written long after they were dead. But we’re told they’re the real deal, we’re told they’re the ones that tell the true story of Jesus and his preaching and that anything that deviates from them is bogus. But there’s no proof of that. And there’s a hell of a lot of material to support questioning it. The world’s top biblical scholars have documented references to many other writings, other gospels that have never been found but that could predate the ones in the Bible—close to fifty of them, at last count. That’s fifty other gospels that we’ve never had a chance to read, and those are just the ones we know about. And yet we still take the book we’ve been handed down for granted as being the real thing, and that’s the book that rules almost every aspect of our lives. It’s the book they quote in the Senate when they’re deciding whether or not to go to war, or if a woman can have an abortion or not. It’s the book that people believe contains the words of God. Literally. Without having the first clue about where it came from or how it was really put together.”
“And this trove could change all that,” Reilly noted.
Tess nodded. “Are you kidding me? We’re not talking about postage stamp fragments like the Dead Sea Scrolls or even a few random codices like the ones from Nag Hammadi. We’re talking about an entire library of gospels and early Christian writings here, Sean. Dated, documented, complete, and original, not translations of translations of translations—a full, authentic, unadulterated picture of all the different takes on Jesus’s life and words. It could revolutionize our understanding of the man and the myth—in fact, I’m sure it would. ‘Cause I don’t doubt for a second that Jesus’s words were very different from what we’ve been sold since Nicaea. I mean, how else could His message of possession-free selflessness, a message that was aimed at lifting up the poor and the oppressed, have ended up as a religion of the rich and powerful in Rome without being corrupted to fit its new agenda?”
“The religion of the emperor,” Reilly said, recalling Hosius’s letter.
“Exactly. Think about what really happened at the Council of Nicaea. An emperor—not a pope—brought together the most influential priests and bishops from all over his empire, sat them in a room, and told them to work out their differences and come up with one doctrine that would become the official, accepted version of Christianity. An emperor, not a pope. A warrior-king, a ruler, a messiah, really, if you want to use the real meaning of that word—a man who had just defeated his opponents and taken control of a divided land and who needed something incredibly powerful to unify all the different parts of his empire. We have a chance to discover the texts that didn’t make the cut, the other versions of what Jesus said and did—the ones Constantine and the founders of the Church decided we shouldn’t know about.”
Her eyes blazed into him. “We’ve got to find it,” she insisted. “It’s an incredible, crucial key to our history, but it can also be devastating. We’ve got to find it and make sure it’s handled the right way. These writings could answer a lot of questions for those who can handle the truth, but they’ll also kick up one hell of a crisis for those who can’t, and there are a whole lot more of those out there. A few years ago, one line, just one line from some fragments of a supposedly earlier version of the Gospel of Mark, was enough to whip up a storm of controversy because it insinuated that Jesus had spent a whole night teaching ‘the secrets of his kingdom’ to another man who was only wearing a ‘linen garment,’ with all the connotations that entails. Imagine what a truckload of alternate gospels might do.”
Reilly studied her thoughtfully, absorbing her words, but even before she was done, he already knew he couldn’t head home. Not yet. Not before doing everything he could to try to find those chests. In the wrong hands, they were potentially a weapon—a weapon of mass despair, if you considered that a third of the planet’s inhabitants were Christian, and that a lot of them considered every word in the Bible to be sacred and inerrant. The problem was, he didn’t want to involve the Bureau and, by association, the Vatican. Things hadn’t turned out too well on that front the last time around. And he certainly didn’t want the Turks involved either. Historic artifacts, especially religious ones, would get confiscated before they’d even had a chance to look at them.
No, if he and Tess were going to do this, they were going to have to do it on their own. Below the radar. Way below. Subterranean below.
“I’m with you,” he finally agreed. “But how? What more can we do? You hit a wall, didn’t you? You said the trail went cold.”
Tess was up now, pacing around, a bundle of nervous enthusiasm. “It did, but … we’re missing something. Conrad must have left us a clue, even in death. He must have.” A realization ignited her eyes. “It’s got to be in that church, where he’s buried.”
“You were just there. You said there was nothing else buried with him.”
“There’s got to be something else,” she insisted. “Something we missed. We have to go back there.”
Chapter 52
Tess cloaked her unease as she watched Reilly go into no-nonsense, steamroller mode to get past the two Jandarma soldiers who were posted outside the hotel.
He told them he’d lost his BlackBerry somewhere in the canyon during the shoot-out, and insisted in no uncertain terms that he absolutely had to go back there to try to recover it since it held confidential FBI material. At the first balk, he ratcheted his tone up a notch and made it sound like a full-bore diplomatic incident was in the offing if any delay resulted in his not getting the device back and that, if he didn’t get there soon, the area would be swarming with American troops in order to secure the missing cache of state secrets.
The snow job worked. Twenty minutes later, the hotel’s van deposited them in the clearing at the mouth of the canyon. A Jandarma Humvee was still stationed there. The only other car in the lot was the dead Byzantinist’s dusty Cherokee, a grim reminder of the blood-soaked trail that had claimed its owner.
They were soon trudging past the cone house where the man had been gunned down. The blood spatter had soaked into the soft, porous rock by the doorway, its faded appearance already making it look like a remnant from the distant past. There were no cops cordoning off the area, no yellow tape, no crime scene investigators poring over every indentation in the tufa. There was no need for any of it. It was all pretty cut and dried, and if the Iranian were to be caught, he wasn’t going to face a trial by jury.
As she went by, Tess found herself shivering and couldn’t shake the image of Abdulkerim’s face bursting with anguish the moment the bullets ripped through him. She’d barely met the man, barely gotten to know him. She realized she knew nothing about him, whether or not he was married or had kids. And now he was dead. All within hours of her meeting him.
They climbed up to the church. Using flashlights borrowed from the hotel, Tess pointed out the mural in the apse’s half dome to Reilly before leading him down to the crypt. She was still shivering as they entered the burial chamber, which was just as they’d left it. Being there was making her relive the scene. It was as if she were watching herself in a 3-D holographic diorama, a haunting replay with Abdulkerim’s worried face front and center.
Reilly must have sensed it. “You okay?” he asked.
She shook the disturbing images away and nodded, then showed him Conrad’s open grave. The broken pieces of the cooking pot were lying beside it. Nothing had been moved.
Reilly glanced around the room. “What about these other graves?”
She raked the beam across the markings on the walls. “Church dignitarie
s and benefactors.”
“They could be hiding something else.”
“Maybe,” Tess told him, her tone skeptical. “Short of digging them all up, it’s impossible to tell. The thing is, if that’s where Hosius’s stash is buried, I think they would have left something behind, some clue to point to it. Otherwise, it could be lost forever. But they’re just names, and none of them stand out as being out of place.”
“Okay. So there’s the mural and this crypt. Anything else?”
Tess shook her head. “We looked around the rest of the church before we left. That’s it.” As she said it, she remembered something—something that had occurred to her back when she was online and getting Hosius’s letter translated, at the hotel. She went back to what he said. “The mural.”
Almost in a trance, she led him back up to the apse. She studied the mural again, aiming her light at the Greek lettering above the painting.
“It’s just weird,” she said, almost under her breath, “having lines from a Sufi poem here, in a church.”
“Sufi being … ?”
“It’s a mystical form of Islam,” she explained. “Very popular in Turkey. It was, anyway, before it was outlawed in the 1920s.”
“Hang on, a Muslim saying in a church?”
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